Matthew Reason

Archive or memory?: the detritus of live performance

The positive valuation of theatre as live performance, and therefore also its transience, is frequently accompanied by the urgent expression of the need to counter that transience by means of documentation. This desire to ‘save’ theatre reaches its most fervent expression (and hope of authority and permanence) with the live performance archive. Archive theory, however, now insists on the instability and uncertainty of the archive, which not only documents but also constructs its subject. In this article, Matthew Reason argues that, by tracing comparisons between archives and human memory, it is possible to establish a new formulation of the archive – as detritus, not completeness – that puts a value on mutability as a reflection of theatres liveness. Matthew Reason is currently completing a PhD on representations of live performance at the University of Edinburgh. He has edited a special edition of the Edinburgh Review (ER106) on Theatre in Scotland, and has previously worked at the Edinburgh International Festival, where his responsibilities included maintaining the archive.

Approaches to the newspaper archive: content analysis and press coverage of Glasgow’s Year of Culture

Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture in 1990 is perceived as an event marking a renaissance in perceptions of the city. This article examines how the contemporary press coverage can be used as a resource to trace the narratives and mythologies surrounding the event. To facilitate this research, a pre-existing archive of press cuttings, totalling over 5000 clippings, was employed. This article describes how the interests of the project, and the nature of the large press archive being examined, led to the utilization of a distinct methodology of media analysis. The article describes the attempt to unite both quantitative, statistical analysis with qualitative, pre-informed examination. By tracing aspects of the practical examination of the Glasgow 1990 press coverage, the article explores the successes and failures of the approach taken and assesses its potential for development and employment in other contexts.

‘Did You Watch the Man or Did You Watch the Goose?’ Children's Responses to Puppets in Live Theatre

Puppets are inanimate objects that, when watched by an audience, are invested with life and motion and character. This is particularly the case, we imagine, with childrens theatre, where there is a cultural assumption that young audiences engage with the illusion and imaginative experience. In this article Matthew Reason uses innovative visual arts-based audience research to explore this question, asking how children respond to puppets in live theatre. In doing so he engages with questions of reality, illusion, belief, and disbelief in the theatre, as well as with questions about the respect and sophistication of young audiences. Matthew Reason is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Head of Programme for MA Studies in Creative Practice at York St John University. In 2006 he published Documentation, Disappearance, and the Representation of Live Performance (Palgrave), and a full-length exploration of childrens experiences of live theatre, The Young Audience , will be published by Trentham Books in 2010.

Still Moving: The Revelation or Representation of Dance in Still Photography.

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Storytelling, story-retelling, storyknowing: towards a participatory practice of storytelling

ABSTRACT This paper presents a practice-led research project that investigates how people from diverse community and school groups understand and respond to oral storytelling. Run in collaboration with York Theatre Royal, the project uses art form workshops (drama, music, fine art) to actively invite participants to make the transition from listeners to storytellers. This paper places these workshops within a theoretical framework that draws upon understandings of storytelling developed by Benjamin, Bruner, Kearney and Wilson. We argue (1) that through the process of (re)telling participants demonstrate a particular kind of embedded knowledge that we have termed ‘storyknowing’ and (2) that inhabiting a story in this open-ended way has intrinsic value. We present a typology of strategies for retelling adopted by the participants and reflect on our development of a participatory practice of storytelling.

Glasgow's year of culture and discourses of cultural policy on the cusp of globalisation

During the course of 2002–03, the European Capital of Culture title was the subject of a widely publicised bidding war between British cities hoping to host the award in 2008. Much of the discussion surrounding this nomination process was about Glasgow, which celebrated its own Year of Culture in 1990 – an event that has been widely credited with inspiring a renaissance in the city’s fortunes. Today, over and above any potential cultural legacies, ‘Glasgow 1990’ is frequently cited as a benchmark example of arts-led urban regeneration and successful city re-branding, a lasting perception that is indicative of how the event itself was conceived within cultural policy discourses of marketing, tourism and economic enterprise. Indeed, as this paper will explore, Glasgow 1990 provides an apposite forum through which to examine how cultural policy has become articulated in terms of an increasingly dominant ideology of the enterprise economy. As this suggests, a central focus of this paper is on ideological exchange and discourse and on how prominent dialogues that occurred during Glasgow 1990 can today be seen as located at a key point in the intersection between globalisation and cultural policy. This paper will explore the relationship between two particular aspects of globalisation and cultural policy initiatives such as Glasgow 1990. First, and for this paper most significantly, globalisation can be seen as the predominance of a particular way of seeing the world, manifested through a discourse that places corporate and individual economic enterprise at the centre of the liberal democracy. It is here, in particular, that Glasgow’s Year of Culture – located at the cusp of the formalisation of ‘globalisation’ as a centrally resonate term of our times – intersects revealingly with now dominant ideologies of enterprise and the 1. The definition of ‘culture’ is clearly a complex and mobile area of discussion, including broad understandings within anthropology where culture includes the entirety of human activity. Here ‘culture’ is used in a narrower sense, meaning the arts, literatures and crafts created and experienced by professionals, amateurs and audiences. This reflects the definition most often employed within cultural policy research and cultural management studies. Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 16(1), 2006, 73 – 85

Writing the Olfactory in the Live Performance Review

Written discussions about the employment of olfactory effects in live performance always contain within them a sharp limitation: how to communicate the sensual experience of smell in language. That smell is ineffablesomething we know, experience, remember, but cannot put into wordsis almost a commonplace; yet, perhaps, behind the ritual declaration of ineffability lies something more interesting. Communicating the olfactory experience in words may be difficult, yet in the attempts made to do so the translation of the olfactory to the linguistic reveals something about cultural perceptions and valuations of smell in our society. This paper, therefore, utilizes language and discourse analysis as tools to explore perceptions of the olfactory in performance. Initially exploring concepts of ineffability in relation to smell and music, I then discuss examples of the articulation of smell in the language of perfumery and wine tasting, before analysing the representation of smell in a range of live-performance reviews.

The Representation of Live Performance

The concept of disappearance articulates the live arts as actively resistant or impervious to representation, with this transience prominently constructed as a marker of the unique character, force and meaning of performance. At the same time practitioners and theorists alike also demonstrate a powerful preoccupation with questions of documentation, prompted by a fear of forgetting and the need for performance to exist within wider cultural and academic discourses and conversations. Partly contradictory, partly mirroring, each of these discourses of documentation and disappearance drives and motivates the other. They are mutually entangled, mutually dependent, with ideas of disappearance depending on the continued existence of some manner of trace or presence and acts of documentation always involving some degree of fragmentation and absence. Together these two themes underwrite much conceptual discussion and thinking within performance studies.